An Accidental Murder
by kalliopeia
Summary: Duke kills someone by mistake, and Nathan is awkwardly to make him feel less crappy about it. As per usual, they then pick the worst possible time to discuss their issues. Emotional stupidity and bickering occur. Mentions of past Nathan/Duke and current Duke/Jennifer and Nathan/Audrey. Takes place in Season 4, so no current spoilers.


It's pandemonium.

Nathan, Duke and Dwight show up on the scene shortly after the explosion, Nathan and Dwight having gotten the call and Duke having been with Nathan when he did. The medics aren't there yet. They're running around madly, tending to emergency injuries, pulling people out of the rubble, keeping back the panicked crowds.

Duke lifts a beam and finds a middle-aged woman underneath. As soon as the debris is off, she begins bleeding badly from the abdomen. She's conscious, but panicking. Duke runs over and moves to put pressure on the injury.

It hits him instantly.

The adrenaline thunders through his body, as the glorious strength begins to kick in. His focus wants to change, wants to change him from healer to hunter, but he tries to focus. Duke keeps his hands on the woman's injury, tries to press down hard enough to stem the blood but not so hard that he shatters her insides- as he knows he could easily do. The sounds of the disaster sound distant, far beneath the frantic roaring in his ears.

Duke feels _good._

It ends abruptly when he goes flying sideways off the woman, off the blood source. He fights the sudden obstacle before recognizing it as Nathan and backing off, just as the hit hums off and he returns to normal.

Dwight is kneeling beside the woman, yelling for a medic with a blood transfusion.

With a horrible apprehensive feeling, Duke looks at the woman. Her skin is unnaturally pale, her lips tinged blue. She's staring at him, terrified. She doesn't want this to be the end. She's not going to get her wish.

Their eyes are locked when she dies.

/

Duke lies on his bed listlessly, staring at the wall. The sun has gone down now, probably. He knows he won't sleep. He can't even close his eyes. Every time he does, he sees the last moments of a woman whose name he doesn't even know. A woman who died at his hands a few hours before.

He probably deserves to relive it. Some kind of penance, maybe. But every time he pictures her face- mid-forties, blonde, terrified, with pale skin made paler by his transgressions and green eyes that screamed _please-not-yet-I'm-not-ready_ until the moment they fell permanently blank.

He'd been trying to help. Maybe he deserves this for believing that he could be anything other than a force of destruction.

Duke cringes and his eyes close for a brief moment.

Duke opens his eyes again and stares at his wall some more. Normally, when he fucks up- which is frequently- he drinks until he can't stand up. There's a full tumbler of whiskey on his bedside table, but he hasn't let himself take a drink yet. He can't even hate himself properly.

There's a footstep above him, on the deck. His eyes flicker upward. There shouldn't be anyone on the boat, not since he told Jennifer off for cringing away from him too much. Then there's another footfall, and he rolls his eyes.

He knows those footsteps. Probably better than he knows his own.

The door creaks open exactly when he expects it too.

"I already feel like scum. Your participation is not needed," Duke says dully to his wall.

"You're not scum," Nathan replies.

"You sure know how to make a guy feel special."

The bed dips as Nathan climbs in beside him. Duke reluctantly lets his eyes flicker to where Nathan is lying on his back, looking as tired as Duke feels.

"You know me. You know that if you'd done anything wrong, I'd be the first person to call you on it. This wasn't your fault."

Duke grimaces. "Do you know who she was?"

There's a pause. "They haven't been able to identify her yet," Nathan says finally.

"Let me know."

"Self-flagellation doesn't help anyone," Nathan says. "I'd know."

Duke frowns at the wall. "The only thing I can do that would help anyone is to lift the anchor, leave, and never come back."

"If you do that, I will come after you," Nathan says mildly.

"No, you wouldn't," Duke says, because Nathan wouldn't abandon Haven, or Audrey.

"You're right… But I would send Dwight to retrieve you."

That, Duke can imagine. It's not pretty.

"You know it would be better if I weren't here. Things like this wouldn't happen," Duke says dully.

"That's not true," Nathan replies softly. "You're helpful, Duke. You save a lot of lives."

"Yes, but sometimes, when I try to save a life, I instead suck all the blood out of a person like a fucking vampire. How can you, of all people, overlook that? It could have been you!"

Nathan's quiet for a long moment. "If we hadn't discovered it today, eventually it probably would've been."

That's a terrible thought. Duke tries to imagine it- the two of them off saving the world, Nathan getting injured, Duke trying to put pressure on the wound, activating, and not coming back down until Nathan's body has no more blood to give. Waking up with hands pressed to the bloodless corpse of someone he doubts he can live without. It's horrifying, so much horrifying than what happened today that for a moment he actually feels grateful.

Of course, the alternative isn't much better- Nathan and Duke gallivanting around, Nathan getting injured, Duke unable to do anything except watch.

He shudders and resolves to carry a pair of latex gloves with him everywhere he goes from now on.

"I killed someone today. The wound wasn't that bad, the paramedics were coming. She would've lived if I hadn't…" Duke trails off, staring at his hands, hating them.

Nathan reaches over and grabs one of his hands, gripping it a little too tightly. "None of us realized that your curse had a component of… suction."

"We should've," Duke counters. "I did something similar to the blood puddle monster." Nathan's still holding one of his hands hostage, and the angle is beginning to make his shoulder ache, so he rolls onto his back.

"I don't think any of us really took any lasting messages from the blood puddle monster."

"I should've," Duke says stubbornly.

Nathan nods thoughtfully. "Yes, you should've. If you're guilty of anything, that's it."

"You suck at this comforting thing."

"You already knew that," Nathan points out, correctly. "Look, Troubled people have to compensate, a lot. You didn't pay enough attention to know this was going to happen, and it had consequences. But it's not murder, any more than it would be suicide if I stopped taking my temperature every twelve hours and dropped dead of appendicitis."

"At least that's contained," Duke says, miserably. "You're the only person you can hurt."

Nathan could, of course, argue that point- certainly everyone who'd been hurt or killed post-Barn would. Instead, though, he squeezes the hand he's still holding.

"I know you, Duke. You're not a murderer," Nathan says finally.

"You've always known me, and you didn't always believe that," Duke points out.

Nathan doesn't rebut this, but doesn't let go of Duke's hand either. "So that's what you're saying? That I was right?"

"No!" Duke snaps, reflexively.

"Okay," Nathan says quietly. "Duke, I don't think you're a murderer."

Duke contemplates that, for a moment, because he's been so desperate to know that for so long, but now he finds it doesn't really help. He can't articulate that, though, and doesn't want to, so instead he covers with a joke.

"I bet you say that to all the boys."

"Obviously. It's my best line."

Duke rolls his eyes but smiles a bit despite himself.

"Duke," Nathan says, obviously back to Serious Mode, "I see things like this all the time. Troubles gone wrong. Troubles that people don't know about, or can't control, or do something they didn't expect. Dealing with those is what we do."

"I'm supposed to know better."

"And now you do," Nathan says simply. "I'm not worried about this happening again. Are you?"

Now that he thinks about it, he isn't. "I'm sure that would comfort the dead lady a lot."

"I know. But there's nothing we can do about that situation now," Nathan says quietly. "I'm sorry this happened to you. And I'm sorry this happened to her. But now there's not much anyone can do except make sure it never happens again, and I know you will."

"Okay," Duke says quietly, because Nathan puts so little faith in anyone, has spent so much time not trusting him, that the confidence isn't something Duke can discount.

It's now, feeling somewhat better, that Duke realizes with a jolt that Nathan is lying beside him in his bed, holding his hand, and he can so clearly remember a hundred times when things were the same but so different. It stings even more so than usual that Nathan seems to have forgotten so easily.

Normally he wouldn't say anything, but Duke has no patience left and it's not like a big fight would make his day much worse at this point.

"Climbing into bed with me, holding my hand? A guy could start to think you're taking advantage," Duke jokes, knowing the instant it's out of his mouth that it's the wrong thing to say. Then again, this is Nathan, and if there is a right thing to say on the subject of their former relationship, he hasn't found it yet.

Nathan blinks, looking over at their joined hands, as if just now remembering what it is his hand is doing. He pulls away, but not very far. "For what possible endgame?"

Duke's face twists in an ugly way and his body tenses, gearing up for a fight. "Don't act like it's so fucking ridiculous," he snaps, because surely Nathan has to remember, surely he hasn't really just forgotten.

Nathan actually laughs aloud, bitterly. "Of course it's _fucking ridiculous_."

Duke glares at him. "It's not, and you know it."

"The numb guy attempting to seduce? What would be the point?"

"If I'm not just a killer, you're not just the numb guy," Duke snaps, ignoring Nathan's slightly pleased blink. "And fuck you, fuck you for pretending you don't remember when I _know_ you do. There _was_ a point."

And he rolls over, grabs Nathan's face with both hands, and kisses him.

It's terrible, of course, because Nathan can't respond properly and doesn't particularly seem to want to. Maybe he thinks that staying limp beneath Duke's lips will prove his point, or perhaps he just doesn't care.

Either way, Duke rolls back off, returning to his position on his back, even more frustrated than before.

"What do you want?" Nathan asks, subdued. "What is your endgame here?"

"Why do I need an endgame?" Duke demands.

"Because you have Jennifer. I have Audrey. Insignificantly enough, we both have significant others. You're not supposed to kiss me just because you feel like it," Nathan says, bitterness in his voice, and Duke hears an implicit _anymore_ that Nathan may or may not have intended at all.

Duke deflates. "Oh. Yeah." And then, a moment later, "How did that happen?"

"You and Jennifer? No idea. Frankly she doesn't seem like your type."

Duke grimaces toward his ceiling. "Yeah. Well. No, how did we get from… where we were, to here?"

"Numb," Nathan says shortly, waving a hand over his body, as if it should be obvious.

And it's not like Duke didn't know it was a factor- it was always hanging between them. Duke remembers getting in an argument with Nathan, on that fishing trip years ago- an argument about the varying interactions of Duke's smuggling and Nathan's policing, the likes of which they'd had dozens of. It hadn't worried him. It hadn't even worried him when Nathan got pissed enough to start throwing punches- also not atypical in their relationship. It had been strange when Nathan withdrew suddenly, eyes huge, demanding that Duke take them back to shore, but even then Duke hadn't been concerned. He hadn't been particularly worried when Nathan quietly announced that it was over between them, as they broke up at least once a month and it hadn't stuck yet. In retrospect, Duke knows he must have looked like an asshole, but at the time he honestly didn't realize anything was amiss. He started putting it together about a week later when he saw Nathan stumble in the clumsy way he hadn't since he was seven years old.

"What, that's why? Your Trouble is why you're with Audrey instead of me?" And god, he didn't mean to put it that bluntly, but that was the face of it.

"I couldn't keep putting my life on hold," Nathan says stiffly. "And it never would have worked out, not like this."

Duke hates that assumption too, hates that Nathan was never willing to try. After all, Nathan had tried numb dating with Jess (Jess who treated him like a cheap novelty, something to be casually picked up and toyed with and even more casually thrown away) and Jordan (who in a few months rendered ridiculous years of Nathan saying he'd never date someone as manipulative as Duke, Jordan for whom every kiss was inscribed in a battle plan). Maybe Duke was a dick back then, maybe he's no better now, but he's certain he could do better than that. He'd try, at least, and so few people seem to be willing to offer Nathan that.

He doesn't say so now- a few months ago, maybe he would have, but Nathan's not with Jordan or Jess anymore. He's with Audrey, Audrey whose touch he can feel, and it doesn't matter what Nathan used to feel for Duke or even what he feels now- Duke can't even begin to compete with that, and he knows it.

He's supposed to care about them too much to try. He's supposed to be happy with Jennifer; sweet, openhearted, genuine Jennifer, so unlike the bitterness bred in Haven that he can barely comprehend her most days. He's never been what he's supposed to be in his life.

"So, that's it, then?" Duke asks. He doesn't usually accept defeat, but Nathan's always been more stubborn than him.

"For now, at least," Nathan says, his voice subdued. "Do you have a better proposal?"

Duke doesn't, and he hates that he doesn't, but Audrey can give Nathan something Duke can't even begin to match. He can't be the one to suggest that Nathan give that up, even if he wants to. He knows that Nathan would come to resent him for taking the sacrifice. And, honestly, he likes Jennifer. Jennifer makes him smile in a way nothing in Haven ever has. The thought of things being cut so short between them isn't something Duke wants either. Then again, Duke has always wanted more than he could possibly have.

"What happens if we win? If we fix this?" Duke demands.

"You mean if all of us outlast the Troubles," Nathan says flatly. Duke nods, and Nathan snorts. "The chances of that are dismal."

Duke sighs and closes his eyes. "Yeah. You're right." He hopes that Nathan survives. Nathan deserves that, deserves to live a long life feeling the sun on his face. Maybe Duke deserves that too, maybe not, but either way he wants Nathan to make it out.

He hopes they all do. He wants a time when the biggest concern they have is a weird love quadrangle. But Nathan's right- the chance isn't good enough to really even consider.

"So Jennifer's crashing at my apartment tonight," Nathan says conversationally.

"Is she all right?"

"A bit shaken up, but you know her. She's already forgiven you," Nathan replies.

"So are you sleeping here?" Duke asks, a bit hesitantly.

"Yeah," he says, sounding a bit apologetic, which for Nathan is downright shocking. "You kind of scared us earlier, with how quickly you ran off."

Duke wonders if he's supposed to apologize, but doesn't. "Fine."

"I can sleep in the other room, if that's easier."

And it would be, but easy has never been meant for them. "Stay."

At some point in the middle of the night, Duke wakes up to find that Nathan's hand has somehow found his once more. He doesn't know if they'll both survive the Troubles- the Troubles that have torn them apart twice now and might not stop there. He doesn't know what will happen with him and Jennifer, or with Nathan and Audrey. He doesn't even know if he'll manage to get out of this thing without turning into the worst kind of monster.

But somehow he suspects he and Nathan are never quite going to get away from each other. Somehow he suspects they're always gonna end up right back here.


End file.
